Microsoft Introduces Copilot’s New Background Agent Autopilot Feature

There’s a new background agent in town: Autopilot! Each Copilot task runs in its own VM, storage, and cloud account. You can use Autopilot when you’re offline too. Autopilot uses OpenClaw (previously called Scout), and it can be triggered by @-mentioning someone in Teams/Outlook/Docs. Examples include monitoring a Teams channel or collecting quotes from vendors. Additionally, Microsoft is changing the pricing model for Autopilot and their Code feature (which allows you to write code in natural language) from subscriptions to pay-as-you-go.

Subscriptions don’t work well for background agents such as Autopilot. Some background agents don’t need any resources for extended periods of time, while others could run a task all day long. This makes it difficult to predict how much resources a background agent needs. Also, the pricing for different tasks in Claude Code is quite variable, so I keep track of tokens spent rather than subscription fees. At the moment, there are no pricing information available for Autopilot. We’ll see how this affects companies compared to the old license fee.